AuthorMapper

Springer offers a cool tool that puts its authors on a map so that you can visualize patterns in scientific research. AuthorMapper integrates content with mapping technology. Besides mapping author locations, the technology also delivers graphs, timelines, and keyword tag clouds that visually summarize the data and can also be selected to further refine your search terms.

Although the site includes 150 years of articles from 1,900 journals, it's too bad more journals are not included. By way of comparison, PubMed indexes approximately 5,200 journals and the database contains over 18 million citations.

In any case, AuthorMapper creates graphs that illustrate publication year, author names, journal titles, countries, subject, and institution. Keyword searches on terms like leprosy, polio, and carbon footprint yield interesting results, leading to further exploration of why publishing patterns appear the way they do. Searching on a known author's name can produce a geographical view of his or her collaborators and co-authors. Be careful, however, in interpreting the results. AuthorMapper is a work in progress and developers have not given clear guidance on how it parses and responds to a query.